Don't let a snow day—or any other kind of inclement weather day—throw your work week out of whack. A little bit of preparation and planning can ensure a snow day is a fun chance to work from home instead of a headache that follows you through the rest of the month. The following advice would serve you well all year long, but especially when a winter storm could keep you home bound.

Have a Life Line: You need a way to work outside of the office. Whether this means being able to log into your corporate intranet from home or having your work laptop with you will depend on your work. Nonetheless you need to have both the necessary lifeline and the ability to use it. It won't do you any good to be able to work from home if you've never actually tried out remote computing. The day you're snowed in with deadlines looming and a mess back at your office is not the day to find out that you don't actually know how to remote into your workstation. You might want to take a peek at the top five remote desktop tools, how to maintain a consistent workspace across multiple computers and free ways to synchronize folders between computers. Even if you don't make it a habit to work outside of your office—good for you, excellent work-life balance!—it pays to be prepared to do so.

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Don't Leave a Disaster: You start off Monday on the wrong foot. You leave a wreck at your desk and a bunch of unprocessed notes tossed into your inbox to deal with later. A blizzard rolls through and you're essentially locked out of your own office for 2 days while municipal services beats back Old Man Winter to free the city. By the time you return, the unfinished business of Monday has become the enormous pain in the ass of Thursday. What kind of work it will take to leave your office in an "At Ready" state to tackle the next work day—weather interruptions or not—depends on your work and how big of a mess you kick up every day. Taking a few minutes at the end of each work day to get things in order for the next day and not leave any unaccounted for business will make the next day go smoother, even more so if the next morning in the office gets delayed on account of snow.

Know Your Work's Inclement Weather Policy: Educational institutions like high schools and colleges tend to have extremely clear cut inclement weather policies. Many corporations unfortunately do not. Check with your human resources department to see if your company has one. Inclement weather policies generally cover information like what would trigger an automatic closure of your office and so forth. If your company doesn't have a policy, it would be a goo idea to bring it up at your next meeting and hash out with your boss what the informal policy will be.

Have a System for Communicating Closure Status: Barring the obvious impassable wall of ice and snow outside your front door, you need some sort of system to communicate that a snow day is in effect. Schools have long had radio stations to do their dirty work and many colleges have gone to a text msg system where students are notified via txts if the college is shut down.

Again, this kind of system is lacking in most private companies but it doesn't have to be. Your office can use a system as old fashioned as the phone-tree systems of yesteryear—everyone has two people to call and thus every person gets at least two calls telling them the office is closed and nobody is overlooked—or as modern as a email list or a mass txt message. You might scoff and say "We'd never get that organized at our office." but it's worth the effort. You wouldn't want to be the only person that manages to risk their life a dozen times driving through a blizzard just to find out that you're the only one at the office for the day. You may want to take a peek at previously reviewed Tatango for group SMS-messaging and how to make a mailing list in Gmail.

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Know When a Snow Day really is a Snow Day: Sometimes despite your best effort to be prepared, Old Man Winter pulls out the stops. If the storm has knocked out the power, buried your office under snow, sealed your car in the driveway behind a wall of ice, and blocked out the sun to kill your last chance of hooking your laptop up to a solar charger, it might just be time to throw in the towel and enjoy a day off. If you left your office in working order and ready for a fresh new morning, a day left to idle won't lead it ruin. Throw some logs on the fire and enjoy a mother-nature enforced vacation.

Have a tip or two of your own to share? Whether you're preparing to do battle with a blizzard or simply like keeping your work-from-home toolkit up to date, we'd love to hear your tips and tricks in the comments.